"Never mind about going to the office. I don't know exactly how well Brookings is going to like some of the things I'm going to tell him, and you're working for me, you know, not for the office. I've got plenty. Here's five thousand, and you can have three weeks to spend it in. Three weeks from to-day I'll call you on your wireless phone and tell you what to do. Until then, do as you please. Where do you want me to set you down? Perhaps the Perkins roof will be clear at this hour."
"Good as any. Thanks, chief," and without even a glance to assure himself that DuQuesne was at the controls Loring made his way through the manifold airlocks and calmly stepped out into ten thousand feet of empty air.
DuQuesne caught the falling man neatly with an attractor beam and lowered him gently to the now-deserted roof of the Perkins Café—that famous restaurant which had been planned and was maintained by the World Steel Corporation as a blind for its underground activities. He then seated himself at his console and drove his projection down into the innermost private office of World Steel. He did not at first thicken the pattern into visibility, but remained invisible, studying Brookings, now president of that industrial octopus, the World Steel Corporation.
The magnate was seated as of yore in a comfortably padded chair at his massive and ornate desk, the focus and the center of a maze of secret private communication bands and even more secret private wires. For Steel was a growing octopus and its voraciously insatiable maw must be fed.
Brookings had but one motto, one tenet—get it. By fair play at times, although this method was employed but seldom; by bribery, corruption, and sabotage as the usual thing; by murder, arson, mayhem, and all other known forces of foul play if necessary or desirable—Steel got it.
To be found out was the only sin, and that was usually only venial instead of cardinal; for it was because of that sometimes unavoidable contingency that Steel not only retained the shrewdest legal minds in the world, but also wielded certain subterranean forces sufficiently powerful to sway even supposedly incorruptible courts of justice.
Occasionally, of course, the sin was cardinal; the transgression irremediable: the court unreachable. In that case the octopus lost a very minor tentacle; but the men really guilty had never been brought to book.
Into the center of this web, then, DuQuesne drove his projection and listened. For a whole long week he kept at Brookings' elbow, day and night. He listened and spied, studied and planned, until his now gigantic mentality not only had grasped every detail of everything that had developed during his long absence and of everything that was then going on, but also had planned meticulously the course which he would pursue. Then, late one afternoon, he cut in his audio and spoke.
"I knew of course that you would try to double-cross me, Brookings, but even I had no idea that you would make such an utter fool of yourself as you have."